But the pandemic has made us all stand still and face our own brand of bullshit. I was forced to slow down and evaluate my constant need for validation and approval; the fact that I didn’t know how to love myself properly. I started bucking against the notion that my self-worth was tied to my productivity and value in the marketplace. I told myself it was okay to do nothing. Editors were reaching out for hot takes, but I didn’t have anything new to say in the shock of the moment as it was unfolding before us.
Mrs. Bridge, published in 1959, is a classic American novel about the misunderstandings and alienation of an incurious housewife living in Kansas City during the interwar years. In lieu of the classic chapters-based format, however, author Evan S. Connell wrote 117 vignettes, which are presented chronologically. These neat, linear images function in several ways: as a social critique of the era’s lust for conformity, as an aesthetic choice representing the psychology of his protagonist, and as an attempt to explicate time’s relationship to a forward-looking, consumptive lifestyle—all of which make the book interesting and relevant today, over sixty years later.
[H]er account makes one of the strongest points yet in the French #MeToo debate: those who once advocated for sexual liberation would now be well advised to accept the liberation of survivors’ voices, too.
Creative people are frequently monsters. As Bernard Shaw provocatively declared, “the true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.” The novelist and journalist Sybille Bedford (1911-2006), the subject of Selina Hastings’s gossipy new biography, is a case in point: Bedford passed most of her 94 years sponging off friends, relations and many lovers, enjoying a life of ease and luxury through their sometimes incomprehensible generosity.
That year, whole seasons collapsed
around us. We were shirt-sleeved and suddenly
pummeled by storm. I prayed to be kept